You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
An interview with Dave White, a water expert at Arizona State University, about what a breakthrough along the Colorado River really means
Arizona, California, and Nevada announced a deal on Monday to reduce the amount of Colorado River water they use, ahead of a bigger overhaul planned for 2026. The agreement is crucial, likely keeping the river from reaching dangerously low levels that would have put water supplies for major cities and agricultural regions at risk. But Colorado River water policy is often knotty and confusing, and it can be difficult to wrap one’s head around just what kind of impact deals like this can have.
To that end, I called up Dave White, the director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University and chair of the City of Phoenix’s Water/Wastewater Rate Advisory Committee. He explained how things work now, what the deal means, and how he’d like to see things change in the future — particularly in 2026, when the current set of water allocation rules expire and are replaced. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
There are more than 100 years of law policy agreements, which we collectively call the law of the river. But the most relevant is an agreement called the 2007 Interim Operating Guidelines for the Coordinated Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. That’s the long name, but we typically call it the 2007 agreement.
That agreement created a set of rules that, as the name indicates, helped to guide the operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. And along with subsequent agreements, particularly the drought contingency plans in 2019, it has guided the management of the reservoir system on the Colorado River and set forth the allocations managing the flow to the lower basin states.
Right now we’re in the time period between when the interim guidelines were established in 2007, updated with drought contingency plans in 2019, and when we’ll hit a deadline for a new set of operating guidelines in 2026. And so all of this is trying to manage the risk from the reduced water supply on the Colorado River and to help reestablish a balance in the supply-demand equation of water in an era of megadrought, climate change, and high agricultural demand and increasing municipal demand.
The first thing that’s important for folks to realize is that this is a proposal. What was announced was essentially an agreement among the lower basin states — California, Nevada and Arizona — to propose a plan to reduce demand in those states. It will need to go through additional steps to identify more specifics, and then this proposal ultimately will need to be adopted by the seven affected states and then endorsed by the Bureau of Reclamation.
What the proposal does is lay out a framework to reduce water demand in the lower basin by about 3 million acre feet. And for context, one acre foot is about 325,000 gallons of water, or the amount of water used by two to four homes in the western United States per year. That reduction would be taken across multiple sectors: agriculture, tribal communities, and some municipal or urban users, most notably the Metropolitan Water District of California, which is the Los Angeles area.
The idea is to reduce demand through voluntary conservation. And then part of the package is compensation for some of that voluntary conservation in the form of funding from the federal government through the Inflation Reduction Act to the tune of about $1.2 billion. That is an absolutely critical part of the of the story: the Inflation Reduction Act has really enabled this breakthrough, because of the federal funding for those voluntary conservation measures.
Another critical part of the story was that recently the Bureau of Reclamation released what’s called a draft environmental impact statement, and it presented a couple of alternatives to the states for consideration. Those proposals gave us kind of a federal government’s perspective on the framework moving forward. It was essentially a classic negotiating tactic, where the Bureau of Reclamation said, “look, you states have yet to reach a consensus agreement, so we’re going to lay out a plan,” and, as is often the case, everybody was unhappy with parts of that plan.
That helped to stimulate additional negotiations and bring California, in particular, more to the table. So it’s a very important moment in time because it represents a turning point in multi-year negotiations between the states. Importantly, it lays out a path forward for a consensus agreement that is driven by the states as opposed to being imposed upon them by the federal government. So, we’re talking about a breakthrough in negotiations that led to a three-state proposal.
Well, that’s what we’re waiting to see. We don’t have all of those details yet.
Legally, the Bureau of Reclamation needs to go through this process, weigh the different alternatives, evaluate it, identify what they would call a preferred alternative, and then ultimately make a determination. But the Bureau of Reclamation has certainly indicated there’s initial support for this proposal and that the funding would be made available.
We don’t know who specifically would receive how much of that funding but we do know that it will be agriculturalists (essentially farmers and ranchers), some municipalities such as the Metropolitan Water District of California, and some Native American communities.
We are still engaged in what I would call incremental adaptation. This is adapting to the rapidly changing conditions that are presented by this 22-year-long drought, the so-called megadrought in the region. We are also adapting to the impacts of climate change. If you go back, you know, the 2007 agreement was an incremental update to deal with a very significant risk of shortage on the Colorado River system in 2000 to 2005. We had the drought contingency planning process in 2019 that was another incremental adaptation at that time that was meant to get us to 2026, when the current guidelines expire. Environmental conditions continue to rapidly change, while the demand side continues to stay high. And while we’ve made a number of efficiency gains and voluntary reductions, the river is simply over-allocated for the flow that we have seen, especially since the turn of the millennium.
So we’ve been engaging in a series of incremental adaptations. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a very smart strategy as you move along, right? You’re incrementally adapting your policy to reflect the changing environmental and social conditions. This is another important incremental adaptation that will hopefully allow us to keep working towards the 2026 guidelines.
What I and many others argue is that we need a more transformative adaptation, we need a more significant restructuring. Now, it’s difficult to do that right now in the midst of a very short-term risk. But eventually, between now and 2026, we need to address some of the structural imbalance, or deficit, in the river. We have over-allocated the river in this era of increasing drought and climate change.
We’ve got to restructure the demand over the course of the next several years, and that’s going to require more transformational kinds of changes. But I also want to point out that’s not limited to reducing demand, right? You can do that through dramatic increases in efficiency. We can produce the same units of product, whether that be food or microchips or homes or businesses, with significantly less water.
The most effective strategy is efficiency. It’s the cheapest. It does not require significantly new infrastructure or new water augmentation. And there are lots of good stories out there, in creating more efficiencies and creating more flexible policies and more adaptability within the way that we manage water. We’ve got to sort of wring every cool new approach we can out of the system.
One that I think is really important is that the city of Phoenix and several of its regional partners in central Arizona are in the planning stages of moving towards an advanced water-purification process. What that means is it would allow the cities to pool their wastewater resources, their effluent, and then be able to treat that water through advanced water purification so we can reuse that water for municipal use. We call that direct, potable reuse of the water.
Central Arizona is incredibly efficient, we reuse about 90% of all the wastewater that we produce in the central Arizona region for power production, for urban irrigation, for agriculture, etc. But we can actually reuse that water to support households and businesses. We can then use that water again. Some of it is consumed by people, but basically cycling the water through the city as many times as possible reduces the need for new raw water.
So the current proposal that’s in the process of being developed by the City of Phoenix Water Services Department is for advanced water purification that, according to the current estimates, would produce about 60,000 gallons of water a day for City of Phoenix residents from wastewater. And so, that’s one way we can be much more efficient in recycling and reusing our water.
I do think it gets to the need for greater public understanding and then, you know, individual and collective action. In single family residential households, for example, 50% or more, on average, of the water use is outside the home for things like residential landscaping and swimming pools. In the Phoenix area, we’ve seen a really significant trend in reducing water demand inside single family homes, thanks to technologies like low water-use toilets and more efficient washing machines and dishwashers and so on. The next frontier is getting more progressive with the way we manage residential landscaping water. And that's something that every individual household can do.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority, the Las Vegas Regional Authority, has been really at the forefront of these kinds of strategies with turf buyback programs, incentivizing homeowners, and creating all sorts of both incentives and policies to reduce that outdoor residential demand. And that’s something where individual households can be empowered.
No, I really don’t. It’s about a sort of risk management in the short term, and then crafting new policy approaches and new management strategies over the long term. So I don’t think these get in the way of each other. The 2019 agreement essentially bought us some time, and this round of proposals and anticipated agreements will continue to buy us some time.
Do I think we need more adaptation, and more significant changes? Absolutely. But I would never criticize these incremental plans, because they’re absolutely necessary to manage short-term risk.
Without these actions, there was a plausible scenario where levels in the reservoirs could drop below the minimum power pool, meaning we wouldn’t be able to create power out of the Hoover Dam. In [the Bureau of Reclamation’s] 24-month studies, we began to see scenarios in which the lake levels dropped below the intakes, meaning we wouldn’t be able to deliver Colorado River water whatsoever to the states.
When you start to see these highly undesirable scenarios where you lose the ability to produce power, you potentially even lose the ability to deliver any water at all from the Colorado system to Arizona, California, or Nevada, you know you’ve got to act and engage in short-term risk management.
The risk that we’ve always seen is that you get some relief from the kind of very strong winter precipitation in the Rocky Mountains and in California that we had this year. But as a colleague says, we cannot let one good winter take the pressure off. I never want to root against good news, and the winter precipitation and the new proposal and potential agreements are good news. But you got to keep the pressure on and keep the emphasis on the long-term strategies.
[Laughs] Yes.
Well, I think you can look at it both ways. Yes, there was the intention that the 2019 plans would get us to 2026. Turns out the 2019 plans got us through 2022. That’s just the reality we’re in. Do I wish the 2019 plans would have gotten us to 2026? Yes. But without the 2019 plans, we would have been at risk of minimum power pool levels even earlier.
I was hopeful the 2007 plans would get us to 2026. But the reality is that the climate is changing, the drought has just been incredibly persistent. I mean, we now know from looking at reconstructions of the past climate that this 22-year period is the driest period in our region in the last 800 years for certain, and very likely in the last 1,200 years. That’s an exceptional period of drought. And so, by some measures, you know, it’s pretty remarkable what the water management community has done to manage the risk without significant disruption to the region. So in some ways, it’s a success story.
The single most important thing everyone recognizes is that we really need to chart a new path forward for agriculture. Particularly for agriculture in the lower basin, and even more specifically for non-food forage crops in the lower basin.
We still use two-thirds or more of our water in the lower basin for agriculture, and most of that is used for forage crops, like alfalfa, which feed livestock. So we very much need to restructure the agricultural sector in the lower basin and think about prioritization of certain types of agriculture in certain locations. And importantly, we need to work with agricultural communities, with landowners and businesses, to help them transition to a future that recognizes there’s less water available. And, you know, this is the challenge that we face: How do we make an intentional, thoughtful, supportive transition to a new, more efficient, and more appropriate type of agriculture in the West?
This region is in an amazing region to grow alfalfa if you have water. And so, there’s lots of rational choices that were made along the way. But in an era of significantly reduced water availability, it is simply not sustainable for us to continue to use that much of our available water for agriculture, and in particular for forage crops mostly to support cattle. And so this has to change.
I fully recognize, though, that these are private property rights, and there needs to be a process for this. We can’t just simply have a situation like what we saw in the Midwest where we just move all of our manufacturing overseas and abandon entire swaths of the country. We have to think about how we can help, whether it’s through compensation, community planning, capacity building, job transitions, etc. But that’s the biggest part of the solution. We need to be very thoughtful about that.
I think one of the key things we really need to get into the planning process [for 2026] is greater adaptability and greater flexibility so we’re able to respond to changing conditions. Under the current guidelines there is a priority rights process where we would have [hypothetically] seen the reduction of essentially all — 100% — of Arizona’s allocation of the Colorado River, before any of California’s rights were reduced. But it seems implausible to eliminate the Colorado River water supply to Phoenix, which is the fifth largest city in the country. These are the third rails of water politics. We have to rethink the way that these water allocation decisions are made, and we’ve got to be much more flexible, much more adaptable, and really think about how we can respond to climate and water conditions.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.